Description: Advanced Topics in Corporate Finance and Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) covers a broad range of corporate finance concepts. As part of a 10-year strategic plan exercise, you'll apply opportunity engineering to help guide senior management in introducing a new product to market. You'll also focus on three applications of Extreme Value Theory (EVT), which are covered and tested in a business context.

Description: This presentation considers the pricing of European derivatives in a Black-Scholes model with stochastic volatility. The presentation shows how Parseval’s theorem may be used to express those prices as Fourier integrals. This is a significant improvement over Monte Carlo simulation in many cases. The main ingredient in this presentation's method is the Laplace transform of the ordinary [constant volatility] price of a put or call in the Black-Scholes model, where the transform is taken with respect to maturity [T]. The presentation derives these formulas and then applies them to the case where volatility is modelled as a Markov chain in continuous time, the so-called 'Markov regime switching model'. This model has been used previously in stochastic volatility modelling, but mostly with only N=2 states. The presentation shows how to use N=3 states without difficulty, and how larger number of states can be handled. Numerical illustrations are given, including the volatility smile in a three-state model.

Description: Catastrophic insurance futures are being traded, albeit thinly, at the Chicago Board of Trade. This paper examines the broad context for trading insurance risk. The motivation for trading insurance risks, specifically to increase the capacity to cover risk, is discussed. From Securitization of Insurance Risk: The 1995 Bowles Symposium, M-FI97-1.

Description: This article briefly summarizes the history of the Passive Foreign Investment Company (PFIC) tax regime. Then it provides a detailed description of the PFIC proposed regulations issued in July of 2019.

Description: Our panelists will explore fixed income topics from an actuarial perspective. We'll start with the basics of bonds, including sensitivity measures like duration and higher moments. Then, we'll discuss bond ALM characteristics, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of incorporating various bonds into a portfolio. Finally, we'll cover actuarial modeling considerations, such as reinvestments, defaults, expenses, and other assumptions. We encourage the audience to ask questions throughout the presentation and we hope you can join us for an engaging discussion!

Description: This report explores how artificial intelligence can be applied to investment and retirement planning, highlighting real-world applications, risks, and recommendations.

Description: Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming the investment landscape. From natural language processing and large language models to physical AI applications like robotics, autonomous vehicles, and drones, the evolution of AI is reshaping both how we analyze data and where we find opportunity. We’ll begin by exploring the evolution of AI, which is already driving disruption across industries such as coding, customer service, and marketing. However, the future of AI is physical AI (drones, AVs, robotics). With valuations already stretched, and growing concerns about the “circular economy” and bubble risks, investors should focus on high-quality tech companies that generate free cash flow and deliver strong returns on invested capital. We'll explore examples of interesting companies across the globe: Meta, Alphabet, and Uber in the US; ASML in Europe; Tokyo Electron in Japan; TSMC in Taiwan; and BYD in China. The session will also examine how natural language processing and large language models are reshaping the way quantitative and fundamental managers extract insights from raw data. We’ll highlight how these tools are being deployed to enhance understanding of risk and return, and how they’re increasingly supporting collaboration between quant and fundamental teams.

Description: Summary of April 2020 Investment Section Town Hall and come additional commentary.

Description: This article lays out a generic framework on how to hedge a European call option on a non-dividend paying stock using futures in a stochastic interest rate environment.

Description: In this article, the author presents a case for using a Risk Return On Capital approach as a way to integrate desirable properties of the Economic Value Added approach and the Return On Risk-Adjusted Capital approach. The EVA approach has a shortcoming in that is does not reflect rating agency capital. The RORAC is computed as the ratio of expected total underwriting return to allocated risk capital, and represents the expected return for both benign and potentially consumptive usage of capital. The RROC approach measures returns after reflecting the mean rental cost of rating agency capital. Returns that are a reward for exposing capital to risk of loss are measured after reflecting the cost of carrying capital to support premium written and loss reserves.